STUART ROSS

The Rusty Toque | Issue 13 | Poetry | November 30, 2017

Birthday

​A pigeon stared down at me.I denied myself everything(because it was my birthday).But in the cave of tattoosall they could offer wasa terrible kind of pleasure.The air-raid siren banged my head.A squirrel plunged its teeth in my ankle.While I washed my shattered dishesI saw them through the window:they talked deep into the quivering night.When he hung up the phoneshe hid all her philosophy booksunder the mouldy sofa bed.In the diner destroyed by firehe ordered a tuna sandwichwith a pair of plierstorn out of his headlike a piece of wood and a river.

At Laundromats Here There Are No Dryers

​Where I am, bicycles have no wheels.Figs have no trees. The protestsin the streets have no protestors.The garbage bins are lidless.

Firecrackers, incidentally,have no wicks. Rats have nohammocks, and fish aren’t ableto read. Do you see, now,how different it is here?

My clothes are soakedbut they are clean. I pull them onand walk through the parkwhere the temperature hasno limit. I lie back in the grassthat has no ants, peerinto the sky that has no birds.

But the clouds here, I haven’tyet mentioned the clouds here:they sing these very personal songsabout wronging and beingwronged. They smoke a lotof cigarettes. You can hear it.And I sing along though I haveno voice. I sing with my eyes.

STUART ROSS is the author of 20 books of poetry, fiction, and essays. A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent (Wolsak and Wynn, 2016) won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry. Stuart’s latest is the novel Pockets (ECW Press, 2017). He blogs infrequently at bloggamooga.blogspot.ca and lives in Cobourg, Ontario.

The Publisher of The Rusty Toque is offering a six-week online short fiction workshop starting in January 2019.

DESCRIPTIONIn this six-week online course, award-winning writer, editor, publisher, and creative writing instructor Kathryn Mockler will lead you through the process of idea generation, drafting, and revising a short story. Each week you will receive writing prompts and readings, and you will participate in the fiction workshop.

Format: This course is live and will take place online through video conferencing. This is a workshop-based course where you will share your short story with the class and receive constructive feedback on it from the instructor and the workshop participants.

The Rusty Toque would like to acknowledge the sacred land on which we operate. It has been a site of human activity for 15,000 years. This land is the territory of the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. The territory was the subject of the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and Confederacy of the Ojibwe and allied nations to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes. Today, the meeting place of Toronto is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island, and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work in the community, on this territory.